How long can you stand on one foot? How about standing on one foot, in a hurricane, with bags of sand being hung on your body in random locations every few seconds? The electric grid has been doing something like that for about 100 years.

The electric grid in North America is remarkably reliable, despite the operating conditions and the ever-increasing demands placed on it. We rely on it for much of our lives, and we will be relying on it more. How has the grid adapted to this, and how might it adapt in the future? What threats does it face from acts of nature and human action, whether malicious or merely stupid? What is being done to deal with those threats? Is Smart Grid (or “gridSmart”, “smart meters”, or any of a half-dozen other names) the solution, or part of the problem?

We’ll spend an hour talking about these kinds of questions. We’ll identify the greatest threats, both old and new. We’ll talk about how coming changes to how the grid operates will change the nature of the threats, and how we handle them.